Article: ‘To Tweet or not to Tweet: Social media and the indie’

My first piece for GamesIndustry.biz just got published:

How did you end up here? Many of you will have clicked through from GamesIndustry.biz’s front page. For a large chunk of you, however, you’ll have found yourself digging into this piece thanks to social media.

Almost every writer in this field has become both accustomed to and, in the best cases, positively embraced the propagation of articles via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit et al. Case in point: I can pretty much guarantee that, minutes after this article goes live, everyone from friends and close family through to distant relations and even my milkman will have seen a link to it pop up in their feed before the day is out. It’s both to the benefit of a writer and that of the site it’s hosted on that this article get eyeballs.

Developers are in the same boat. As much as social media has become a vital cog in the wheel for the games press, so too is it an increasingly core element for games developers – and the reason why is essentially identical: gamers use social media just as much as anybody else. For the developers whose lives are just as invested in the major social platforms, it’s been a boon.